Marketing is the process of planning, implementing, and managing a product or service’s total communication to potential and existing customers. Its main objective is to develop a positive image for a company or brand.
A company’s marketing ecosystem is made up of all the actions that are taken by the company’s employees, partners, and customers to promote that brand. It is the combination of various components that make up the entire marketing plan and includes all the activities that are executed through different channels and media to achieve the marketing objective.
In essence, your marketing ecosystem should revolve around four things: your company, your product/service, your customers, and your competition.
Now, here’s the problem. More often than not, businesses focus on one component and end up missing the three other equally important ones.
Our goal is to help you identify each piece of an effective marketing ecosystem so that you can work on them – either one by one or all at once – and enjoy a solid market presence.
Let’s take a look at all the pillars that make for a successful marketing ecosystem.
Brand
The brand is the most important element in any marketing ecosystem. A strong brand can create a positive impression among customers and help the company grow its business. Here’s how you create one.
Graphic Design
Graphic design is the art of making something look good. It is the visual representation of your brand, product, or service. It is an essential part of the marketing ecosystem because it is responsible for capturing attention and triggering interest in any message.
Graphic design encompasses all aspects of print, web, and motion graphics. It is one of the most important marketing elements because it is what people see first when they interact with you and it is what enables brand recognition by presenting a consistent image across all marketing channels.
Logo Design
Your logo is the mark that represents your company. It is your identity; it sets you apart from your competitors and tells customers who you are. Therefore, it should be simple, memorable, and timeless. It should reflect who you are as a business and what services or products you offer.
But that’s the emotional aspect. What about the technical aspects?
A logo should be easy to read and understand and make you want to see more of a brand. A good logo should be able to convey many different messages at once, it should not be too complicated or confusing but also not too simple, either.
Since it will often be used as an icon in other marketing materials, such as advertising and promotional mailers, you should also make sure that your logo is legible on various sizes of devices and in various formats.
Brand Strategy
Brand strategy is the overarching vision of your business, and it is what helps you define who you are as a brand. It is the overall plan for how a company will market its products or services.
Simply put, it is the “voice” that defines your brand and guides decision-making activities. This includes:
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- Identifying the target audience,
- Defining the product attributes,
- Determining how they are going to be promoted,
- What the desired outcome of their marketing efforts will be, and
- Developing an action plan for how they will achieve this goal.
Your brand strategy is a marketing plan for your business to achieve its goals, whether that be to increase sales, increase customer loyalty and decrease customer churn, or increase market share. So, it can be long-term or short-term and can change over time.
Finally, your brand strategy should be based on your values and how those values fit into the larger picture of the industry. For example, if you have a product that caters to families with kids, then you want to make sure that your strategy works to make your brand synonymous with values that appeal to your target buyers, such as reliability and safety.
Positioning
Positioning is a marketing mix approach to defining your target market and how it fits into the overall marketing ecosystem. It focuses on communicating the who, what, where, and why of your business in order to differentiate yourself from competitors.
In other words, it is about communicating your unique value proposition to customers in a way that makes them want to buy what you are selling.
Positioning is a company choice; it doesn’t have to be a single statement or image; it is how you communicate with customers in your communication channels and how they perceive those communications. This is an indispensable element in marketing because it helps showcase your value to your customers as well as ensure that you reach your target audience with the right message at the right time.
Customer/Client/Audience Archetype
The customer is the central character in any marketing ecosystem. It is the person who buys and uses your product, which makes them responsible for your success.
When you are first starting out, it can be difficult to know who your customers are and how to reach them. The trick is to find out what they want — what drives them — and then build a solution that satisfies their needs.
For example: What’s stopping people from buying your product? Why do they hesitate before making a purchase? How do they feel when they have problems with your product? What kind of information do they need before making a purchase decision?
Once you know these answers, you can create a marketing strategy that will allow your business to thrive in the marketplace.
Marketing Activity
Marketing activities are designed to create awareness about a product or service. They may include anything – from advertisements in newspapers or magazines, public relations campaigns, and word-of-mouth communication through referrals from satisfied customers to direct marketing (e-mail), sales force automation, and even trade shows. For now, let’s focus on the three Ps:
Promotion
Promotion is the process of getting your message to the end-user. It is also used to attract new customers and increase sales volume. Promotion is a two-way street: it is not only about getting the right message to the right public but also about listening to what your audience wants and needs.
Publicity
Publicity refers to any activity that increases awareness or popularity of your product/service or company. It can be achieved in several ways, including:
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- word-of-mouth marketing
- media advertising
- press releases
Public Relations
Public relations (PR) refers to a relationship between an organization and its stakeholders, including media, customers, and employees. PR is used to establish credibility for an organization by explaining its products and services to the public.
Content/SEO
In the marketing ecosystem, content is king. Simply because it caters to both consumers and businesses. Consumers are more likely to engage with brands if they can see that the brand has invested in quality content. So, businesses are more likely to grow their sales by investing in content marketing than any other marketing tactic. Here are the most important content formats that every strong marketing strategy requires.
Social Media
Social media is a vital component of content marketing. It is the most popular source of news and information for consumers and is also a very effective way to increase your sales, especially if you have an active social presence.
An extremely effective tool, social media can be instrumental in driving traffic to your site as well as help you build relationships with customers who may become loyal customers later on down the line (if their experience is positive).
Social media is important for any marketing strategy because it allows you to reach people who you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. With social media, you can share content with your followers in a way that makes sense for them, simplifying brand building.
The best part? It is free and easy to set up, you can use it from anywhere at any time, and you don’t need a big budget to start.
Blogs/FAQs
Content is an excellent way for businesses to build an educated customer base. And you need to do that for two simple reasons: 1) sharing information helps you establish yourself as an authority in your industry and 2) informed audiences are more likely to turn into loyal customers.
Blogs and FAQs are also great ways to build awareness about your business. Blogs are good for sharing information about the products or services you offer, while FAQs will help answer common questions customers might have about your product or service.
By creating content that’s easy for customers to find and read – and leveraging search engines like Google – these content tools can reach potential customers who may not have heard about your company before.
Case Studies/Recommendations
Case studies are a great way to show off your knowledge of the subject and help others understand how it works. They are a marketing tool that should not be used as advertising but rather should be used to show your expertise and knowledge of your field. That’s why case studies are so effective when it comes to establishing your authority in the market or building credibility around your brand.
Reputation/Reviews
Reputation plays a key role in influencing consumer behavior and purchasing decisions. As such, businesses must pay attention to their online reputations if they want to attract new customers or retain existing ones.
Before the emergence of social media, there were three ways a brand could manage its reputation:
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- Paid media i.e. paying to generate buzz
- Owned media i.e. using own presence to promote the brand
- Earned media i.e. getting recognition via satisfied users
Thanks to social media, brands have yet another channel (or opportunity) to shape their reputation.
Maintaining a positive reputation can help your business attract new customers who are interested in your products or services, while negative reviews can negatively affect your brand image and damage sales opportunities.
Since people are a big part of building a reputation, having positive reviews from real customers, who have experience with your brand, is imperative for any marketing strategy.
Brands have many ways to build their reputation and earn reviews, but they must be strategic about how they do so. For example, a company that focuses on customer service will have a better chance of receiving positive reviews about its customer service.
Similarly, if you feel that you are filling a market gap with your product or service, acquiring reviews about that specific solution can be an effective way to attract customers seeking that specific solution.
Sales/Communication
As the name suggests, this pillar is all about generating revenue for your business using clear communication with your customers by finding out their needs and providing them with solutions for them. Here’s how you can do that:
Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising includes a wide range of mediums, including television, radio, and print. It is often targeted to specific audiences with geographic boundaries.
For example, if a company is selling its product to women over 50 years old, who live in New York City and have an annual income between $50K and $100K, they might advertise on local television channels targeting these demographics.
Although traditional ads still hold more credibility than digital ads, certain drawbacks that come with this channel (such as lack of extreme customer segmentation and high cost) make traditional ads an unpopular choice among small businesses.
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising has become a popular alternative for businesses because it is cost-effective and reaches a wide target audience at the same time. Digital advertisements can be placed on websites or social media pages like Facebook or Instagram using creative design elements such as images, videos, and text.
Below are a few types of digital ads you can invest in:
- Search ads
- Social media ads
- Retargeted ads
- Video ads
- Native ads
- Display ads
- Audio ads
- Banner ads
- Email ads
One of the biggest advantages of digital ads is that they can be easily targeted based on demographics such as age, gender, and location, so businesses can reach the right people with their message at just the right time.
Thanks to technology, digital ads also give you an opportunity for branding since platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager collect data about your ad campaigns, allowing you to monitor their performance over time. This allows you to tweak your campaigns as you go, which helps you avoid costly advertising mistakes.
Email Marketing/CRM
Email marketing is a crucial part of the marketing ecosystem because it allows businesses to reach a large segment of potential customers at once. The goal of email marketing is to turn leads into sales using extreme segmentation, making it incredibly important for scaling your business.
Email marketing also offers the ability to track open and click-through rates and provide analytics that helps you optimize your email campaigns.
For instance, you can send customized emails based on a customer’s past behavior, like when they bought or just signed up for your newsletter, which can increase your chance of receiving a repeat action from them.
Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a structure that helps you understand where your customers are in their buying journey. It is a visual representation of the process by which a customer engages with your product or service. It includes all the touch points that take a buyer from identifying a need, to evaluating your solution and ultimately buying it.
There are six stages in every good sales funnel:
- Awareness – the buyer is aware of the problem and is looking for a solution.
- Discovery – the buyer qualifies leads i.e. shortlists solutions.
- Evaluation – after narrowing their options down to one brand, the buyer makes an offer.
- Intent – the buyer negotiates the final offer.
- Purchase – the buyer purchases the solution, thus closing the deal.
- Loyalty – if satisfied, the buyer comes back for a repeat purchase.
As you can see, this is an extremely elaborate mapping to ensure the customer journey is optimized as much as possible. If done properly, your sales funnel can prove to be a powerful tool because it can help you understand how your customers interact with your brand.
With a sales funnel, you can measure the success of each stage along the way to their ultimate goal – making a purchase. This is where all your marketing efforts come together because a sales funnel helps you determine which content or marketing activities should be focused on at which stage of the funnel so that it is relevant enough for the customer to take an action.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to marketing, everything boils down to customer experience. All your key metrics, such as:
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- Customer acquisition – finding new customers to start with,
- Customer retention – keeping those customers from leaving in the first place,
- Customer satisfaction – keeping your existing customers happy and satisfied so they continue to buy from you again,
- Brand perception – how people view your brand and what they think about it,
- Brand loyalty – why customers choose your brand over others in the market,
… rely on how well you plan your customer experience journey.
In the past decade, businesses have become increasingly aware of the importance of their marketing ecosystem. And for good reason: The success of your business is tied directly to how well you manage this ecosystem, so it is critical to keep an eye on every element.
Take a look at your own ecosystem and see how you can use each component to make it more effective. Make sure you are using multiple forms of communication (social media, email, etc.) at the same time to reach different customer segments at once. Use marketing channels to promote your content, which can ultimately help improve your bottom line.
And when you need professionals to help you plan your marketing ecosystem, get in touch with us and we will help make marketing less daunting and more profitable for you!